Inspectors certain Iraq will use its deadly weapons

By David Wastell, Philip Sherwell and Julian Coman in Washington

12:01AM BST 08 Sep 2002

A former United Nations weapons inspector gave warning last night that Saddam Hussein is developing frightening new ways to deliver his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, including smallpox and the deadly VX nerve agent.

David Kay, who headed the UN's nuclear inspection team inside Iraq during the early 1990s, said that Pentagon planners believe that Saddam is devising novel means of launching his most dangerous weapons, to replicate the surprise achieved by al-Qa'eda terrorists on September 11.

One possibility is that Saddam could use the links he had cultivated with the Palestinian refugee camps to recruit volunteers willing to be injected with the smallpox virus and then enter Israel to infect hundreds of Jews before themselves succumbing to the disease.

Mr Kay, speaking from his home in Virginia, said: "If you have someone like Saddam in power committed to developing these weapons and with a hatred of the US and Israel, then at some point he's either going to get lucky or succeed in doing something."

Mr Kay and other former UN inspectors contacted by The Telegraph last week believe that Iraq would readmit inspectors only as a way of deflecting an American attack and dividing western opinion.

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None thought Iraq would co-operate adequately with a new inspection team to ensure that his entire arsenal is uncovered.

There have been no new inspections since December 1998, when Richard Butler, the head of the Unscom team, reported that Iraqi obstruction had made his task impossible. Inspectors were pulled out hours before Bill Clinton, the American president, ordered four days of air strikes against suspected weapons sites.

One of Britain's most experienced former inspectors, now an adviser on Iraq to the Government, described the Iraqis' acumen for hiding key personnel and documents from the UN team.

He said: "If we came across names of people we wanted to speak to, they would usually put them forward for us. But they were adept at hiding the people who really mattered.

"On biological weapons, we never came across the person with the knowledge or expertise to drive the programme. There must have been a man at the top but we couldn't find out his name. They would just smile and say, 'there's no Dr Strangelove'."

Terry Taylor, an arms inspector from 1993 to 1997, said inspectors could never be sure of what they had found and what they had not found. "It is spurious to say, as has been said in the past, that 95 per cent disarmament has taken place. How do we know what 100 per cent is?

"When I was there things were fine when we looked at places where they had nothing to hide, and then got difficult when we got near to something useful. It became impossible to meet certain people or have access to certain documents."

Mr Kay, who led one of the first teams to search for Saddam's nuclear weapons programme, recalled repeated attempts at intimidation by Unscom's Iraqi hosts.

At one point, after locating a cache of revealing documents that the Iraqis had not expected to be found, he and fellow inspectors spent four days and nights trapped in a car park, prevented from leaving by guards.

On other occasions Iraqis in the hotel dining room would "start shouting and throwing punches", or inspectors would be bombarded with telephone calls in the middle of the night.

"During the second inspection I led they staged firing squads - which may or may not have been genuine - outside our hotel between 3am and 4am. They were trying to unsettle us.

"Eventually we said that since we were awake anyway, we might as well begin inspections at that time. They didn't like that, so there were no more firing squads."

He said that the newly constituted UN inspection team, Unmovic, would need a much more aggressive approach than that taken by its predecessors if it were to avoid being thwarted by Iraqi obfuscation.

Otherwise it would take inspectors many months just to check the 1,400 previously recorded sites of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, let alone begin to look for new ones.

Overall, Mr Kay said: "I would love for God to recall Saddam but I don't expect either that or a military uprising. The only way to remove him from power is to use military force.

"The only way you will end the weapons of mass destruction programme in Iraq is by removing Saddam from power."

Mr Butler, the head of the team pulled out in 1998, said last week that there was no doubt in his mind that Saddam had made more weapons of mass destruction in the past four years.

He said weapons inspectors would be effective if they were allowed to go "anywhere, anytime" by Saddam.

He urged America to produce its evidence of Iraqi weapons programmes and use that to confront Saddam with a choice: "Give them up now, new inspections, or we'll come and take them from you."

Mr Taylor said: "It would be a surprise if Iraq accepted full inspections.

"The danger is that they are used as part of a political dance which could go on for years and would divide UN Security Council members over what constitutes an acceptable inspection.

"Full and total unhindered access should be asked for with the threat of force if that requirement is not met."